Narrative is an essential operation for navigating time: it has a seemingly infinite capacity to impose, restore, or even dismantle temporal orderings. Storytelling disrupts chronologies by rearranging the order in which events are being told, and it can also override the linear progression of time within the storyworld. One of the most widespread narrative devices for unsettling a linear progression of time is the loop, which is defined by repetition and the return to a beginning or earlier moment.
There has been a notable increase in temporal loops in both mainstream and experimental storytelling in recent years. While often a part of time travel narratives (Jones and Ormrod 2015; Wittenberg 2012), temporal loops can be found across numerous genres and media: from sci-fi (examples include Duncan Jones's action thriller Source Code or Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow) to mystery (see Stuart Turnton's novel The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle or Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar's series Dark) and from literature (Kate Atkinson's novel Life after Life; Alexis Wright's aboriginal epic Carpentaria) and film (Max Barbakow's romantic comedy Palm Springs, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's horror movie The Endless, or Stefon Bristol's science fiction drama See You Yesterday) to television (the first season of Netflix's series Russian Doll) or video games (Luís António's Twelve Minutes, Mobius Digital's Outer Wilds, or Remedy Entertainment's Alan Wake 2).
Despite the cultural prominence of narrative time loops, structural attention to the loop as a transmedially and intertextually recurring narrative form has remained limited.1 We believe it is time to pay closer attention to the loop's unique aesthetic, reflective, and critical potentials. This special issue explores how narratives deploy temporal cyclicality and repetition. It considers a variety of media, genres, narrative strategies, and interpretive effects of time loop stories, and puts these disparate instances into dialogue with one another. We chart some of the boundaries of temporal cyclicality by articulating both its formal and aesthetic traits, as well as its functions and effects. Under what conditions, for instance, does repetition in a narrative begin to suggest cyclicality? What distinguishes time loop narratives from (other) time travel stories? How do narrative texts imagine the repeated return to an earlier moment in time? And how does the time loop engage or include its audience, and to what ends? Time loops may be puzzles asking to be solved, aporias that resist interpretation, or allegorical forms with distinct representational capacities. The essays gathered here address the complexities, the limitations, the playfulness, and the queerness of time loops.
Historical Background
While Harold Ramis's Groundhog Day (1993) popularized the time loop structure for contemporary Western audiences, cyclical temporalities have been a part of Indigenous storytelling for generations. The Oglala Sioux holy man, Black Elk, for instance, described the Sacred Hoop of the Plains tribes by saying that “the Power of the World always works in circles” (quoted in Neihardt [1932] 2014). Broadly speaking, the related notions of “deep,” cyclical, or “spiralic” time continue to inspire new approaches to Indigenous traditions and texts.2 Yet loops in time travel stories have also been used to express a conservative return of the past in colonial archives, a pattern of recurrence that Frances Tran (2018: 190) refers to as “the circular violences of the time loop.”
N. Katherine Hayles (1999) has tracked how the cultural and symbolic meanings assigned to feedback loops have evolved over the last century. The cultural fascination with cyclicity, repetition, and feedback loops has influenced narrative practices. Cyclicity, broadly speaking, was an important theme for modernist writers like James Joyce, but the time loop's formal conventions were first standardized through science fictional experimentation in the 1920s, eventually culminating in its current mainstream preeminence (Wittenberg 2012: 81). In postmodernist literary fiction, Brian McHale (1987: 108) points out, a key strategy for making linear sequences self-erasing is to “ ‘bend’ a sequence back upon itself to form a loop, in which one and the same event figures as both antecedent and sequel of some other event.” And in audiovisual storytelling, temporal loops became a prominent device in “puzzle films” (Buckland 2009) and “complex tv” (Mittell 2015) popularized from the 1990s onward. Loops are also ubiquitous in the contemporary cultural imaginary, be they mechanical or figurative. They range from the feedback loop of an unmuted microphone to the self-reinforcing loops of the climate crisis; from the humorous irony of Bruno Munari's “useless machine” to the dreary repetition of COVID-19 quarantine; and from the adaptive aim of anti-aircraft artillery to the cyclical persistence of institutional ableism (Price 2024). In short, the loop's role in the cultural imagination is increasingly influencing the shapes of narratives across media and genres.
Relationship with Feedback Loops
In physical feedback loops, such as those found in biology or engineering, cyberneticians have identified two basic paths for each time the process begins anew. If each outcome progresses in the same direction as the previous one, this points toward a potentially infinite increase or decrease, constituting a positive feedback loop. The exponential growth of a simple positive loop is inherently unstable, quickly summing toward impossible infinities, and enough iterations of the process will necessarily cause the system to collapse (e.g., the increasing contractions during childbirth or the rate of global warming being further amplified by its own effects, such as the melting of polar ice caps). The other option is a negative feedback loop, in which new inputs yield the opposite result of its previous run; the system, in other words, responds to changes by mitigating their impact. Negative feedback loops correspond to self-stabilizing systems which maintain their own balance (e.g., thermostats that keep a steady room temperature or homeostatic processes, like the regulation of blood sugar levels via glucagon and insulin release). These two basic looping structures can be combined to produce more complex system archetypes (e.g., “the tragedy of the commons” or “shifting the burden”).3 Like the complex systems that rely on feedback loops, temporal loops in fiction are part of complex narrative systems.4
As with physical feedback loops, narrative time loops create a temporal structure in which knowledge of the result of a process—analogous to the output of a transformative system—is sent back to the beginning of the same process and then becomes its input data. In the most commonly known version of a narrative time loop, a character returns to an earlier moment in time with some information about what happened the last time around. In any feedback loop, the system will transform over time, as the input data evolves with each repetition. Accordingly, the nature of narrative means that a character in such a time loop will almost inevitably act differently and make different choices with each iteration, repeating this process until it ultimately results in a different outcome. Other narratives have experimented with “closed” loops, in which characters are predetermined to perform the same actions that maintain a self-perpetuating cycle, rendering past and future interdependent. Moreover, the consumption of a narrative itself can take on characteristics of a loop experience. Rereading a story, rewatching a film, or replaying a game necessarily has a different effect than the first time around, due to the reader/viewer/player's accrued personal history.5 In most popular or mainstream narratives, a time loop occurs as the equivalent of a positive feedback loop that eventually collapses and returns all characters to a linear timeline. Yet negative temporal cyclicality can also yield knowledge and stories of equilibria, such as the phenological patterns of season or the life cycle of an organism. With the growing number of time loop stories in popular and experimental fiction, we see more and more variations of this relation between positive (unstable) and negative (stable) loops.
Structural Visualizations
We distinguish between formal time loops, which involve a literal, diegetic return to an earlier moment in time, and metaphorical time loops, which involve a more symbolic, imaginative return to—or of—the past. Though certain interpretations of general relativity permit the existence of formal loops in our physical universe (Weyl 1928; Misner and Wheeler 1957), actual loops have yet to be observed by experimental physicists. To date, these temporal structures seem to exist only within the realm of the fantastic (Todorov 1975) and science fiction. In contrast to formal loops, metaphorical time loops are rooted in embodied experiences. Metaphorical loops occur when a character or narrator reflects on their past or anticipates the future. Through repetition, such reflections and anticipations can coalesce into an integral motif, an organizing element, or another formal narrational device—this accretion is how an individual experience can feed into a metaphorical time loop. We can imagine formal loops as aligning with the Greek notion of chronos, deployed here to describe the measurement on a clock's face, whereas metaphorical loops operate along the lines of kairos, used here to describe the lived experience of time. Importantly, we do not establish a hierarchy between these forms, and this special issue intentionally includes essays which analyze both.
Some visualization might be helpful for further distinguishing formal and metaphorical time loops. Time maps are the graphs which represent a narrative's temporal structure by plotting its fabula against its syuzhet.6 The time map of a metaphorical time loop is free to take any shape—in fact, the narrative might not even be graphable. Much like the meanderings of a daydreamer, a metaphorical time loop is not bound to any particular pattern because its sense of looping often arises from somewhere beyond the axes of a time map. Narratives with formal time loops, however, will always yield a time map which involves a series of nearly parallel line segments. This parallel pattern might be produced through metaphorical looping, but formal time loops, by definition, must produce it.
Notably, there are two possible kinds of formal looping, depending on the inertial frame of reference from which the looping is observed. The first possibility is diegetically framed looping, where the external world seems to repeatedly reset, even if particular characters maintain memories across iterations (e.g., Groundhog Day, Russian Doll); the second possibility is character- framed looping, which follows the timeline of a single time traveler who visits past/future versions of themself (e.g., All You Zombies, Primer, Mouse X).7 Naturally, these can be intermingled to produce even more complex effects, but we consider them separately here for simplicity.
A diegetically framed loop is portrayed in figure 1. This time map is patterned like a sawtooth: it features a series of solid line segments which are parallel and sloping upward; the endpoints of these line segments are connected by vertical line segments which are dashed. The x-axis corresponds to the narrative's syuzhet, and the process of telling/reading/viewing the narrative is comparable to an invisible line sweeping across the time map from left to right. The y-axis is the narrative's fabula, a diegetic timeline which is external from any particular character's viewpoint. Each solid line represents an iteration of the loop, with their uniform upward slope corresponding to time's even pacing within that particular iteration.8 The dashed vertical lines connecting each line correspond to whatever process resets the loop, which may or may not be explicitly portrayed in the narrative. In general, the solid line segments need not be the same length (e.g., if a loop resets on a character's death, rather than after a fixed period of time). Indeed, if the character ever breaks out of the loop and returns to a normative chronology, the final line will extend indefinitely. In a similar vein, the dashed lines will not be perfectly vertical if the narrative explicitly portrays the actual process of time travel; instead, they will acquire a slope which corresponds to the rate and direction of said time travel.9 Lastly, the presence of horizontally offset lines does not necessarily indicate the presence of a time loop; instead, it simply indicates repeated portrayals of a particular time span (e.g., the various retellings of the crime scene in Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon are horizontally offset; see Yeager 2023). What's most important is that diegetically looping narratives will necessarily feature some degree of repeating events, which inherently involves some degree of horizontal offset on a time map.10
Character-framed looping is visualized in figure 2. This time map features several parallel lines which are vertically offset from one another. The x-axis is the same as before, corresponding to the syuzhet. But the y-axis now corresponds to that particular character's timeline. In most narratives, the character's timeline will be functionally identical to a universal fabula, but the two regularly diverge in time travel narratives. This shift corresponds to a shift in how we should interpret the solid line segments: in figure 1, the solid lines represent events within the story; in figure 2, they track which moments of the character's life are present during a particular moment in the syuzhet. The dashed lines once again represent the means of time travel. A literal reading of this time map would be a narrative in which five copies of the character—each one hailing from equidistantly spaced periods of their life—travel to share a moment together. After this shared moment, they each return to their respective home times. But again, the line segments need not be the same length; they can be scaled and/or shifted to represent the sudden arrival or departure of a particular iteration of the character.11 In short, the places where two versions of the character are copresent will correspond to places where the line segments are coextensive along an invisible vertical line.
The distinction between formal and metaphorical loops provides two key benefits beyond helping us articulate the poetics of time loops. First, it highlights the unique capacity of narrative to capture and make sense of the striking homologies between macro structures (time and humans’ mostly linear conception of it) and the micro level of individual experience. Treating both physical loops and experiential ones as two expressions of a structurally similar event or process is feasible only within the realm of narrative fiction because physical time loops do not, as far as we know at this point, exist outside that realm. Second, the typology we present here allows for a more inclusive and more specific consideration of various forms of temporal looping and the ways in which they correspond with one another. We can thus follow the time loops of collective memory and neurodiverse perception, as well as the looping forms of generational trauma and mental illness. The essays collected here address all outlined forms of narrative looping: both metaphorical and formal, whether diegetically framed or character framed. We are interested in the patterns that emerge across media and texts, but also in the distinct ways in which the loop is used to express, capture, or rethink different temporal experiences.
Contribution Summaries
Brian Richardson opens the collection by mapping the questions that time loops raise for narrative theory. In “Vicious Circles: Circular Fiction and Time Loop Narratives,” Richardson discusses a series of influential cases which highlight some of the time loop's distinct ontological effects, such as the production of unnatural temporalities and the multiplication of (once) individual characters. He also considers several patterns which are associated with time loop narratives, such as their methods of maintaining sequence, their ways of progressing toward an ending, and their affordances for characterization. Time loops, Richardson argues, must be distinguished from adjacent narrative forms, such as the forking-path narrative and the circular narrative. While all these devices create worlds which cannot be understood through mimetic analysis, Richardson describes how each of these various worlds maintain their own distinct ontological status.
Steven Willemsen follows up on Richardson's overview of the form's qualities and capacities by focusing on audiences’ responses to time loop narratives in film and television. In “Kept in the Loop: Narrative Play and Epistemic Emotions,” Willemsen pursues questions regarding audience response, asking how the complex temporal puzzles presented by audiovisual time loop stories produce a specific form of narrative engagement. Building on theories of narrative temporality and narrative complexity, Willemsen argues that a traditionally noninteractive medium like film can elicit a ludic engagement akin to that of gameplay via the cognitive challenges of a time loop puzzle. He substantiates this claim by analyzing a pilot experiment which gauges the interactive dynamics of epistemic emotions—such as interest and confusion—as recorded in real time by viewers of a time loop film. Willemsen shows how time loops can function as a “cognitive playground,” where their narrative complexity suspends audiences in a cycle of observing inconsistencies, forming hypotheses, and anticipating resolutions.
Wibke Schniedermann's contribution builds on her previous examination of involuntary time loop (ITL) narratives (2023). Her previous article argues that these narratives typically conform to the model of Groundhog Day, which ultimately reinforces white, middle-class mores. Schniedermann's contribution to this special issue considers how Trayvon Free's short film, Two Distant Strangers (2020), inverts many of the ITL genre's tropes to critique anti-Black racism. Schniedermann offers a detailed description of Free's film, which was released in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder. The film's protagonist initially assumes he is in a typical ITL, which is structured around positive feedback, and he makes many varied attempts to break out of the loop. Eventually, he realizes that the loop is a negative equilibrium (in multiple senses of the phrase), where the time loop's self-reinforcing nature serves as an analogy for the recurrence of real-world police brutality. Schniedermann's analysis establishes a two-way street between formal innovation and social critique. On the one hand, she describes how Free opens up new possibilities for the fictional device by explicitly centering issues which are very real; on the other hand, she demonstrates how Black artists subvert the defining characteristics of the ITL genre to discuss possible futures.
Adrienne N. Merritt's contribution explores the feedback processes endemic to postcolonial memory. In particular, she considers the operations of Black worldmaking in her article, “The Haunting Poetics of May Ayim's ‘die zeit danach’ (1995) and Ada Diagne's ‘Der Sturm’ (2021).” Merritt offers close readings of her case studies, highlighting how they challenge linear distinctions between past, present, and future. Merritt describes this temporal collapse as a “haunting poetics” and describes how her case studies deploy it to establish Black humanity as an ontological a priori. Merritt pays particular attention to the texts’ citational practices, which span large swaths of the spacetime of the Black diaspora, and demonstrates how this emphasizes interconnections over oceans and across eras. Though colonialism, imperialism, and racism continue to haunt Black existence, Merritt shows how naming these ghosts allows both Ayim and Diagne to imagine new worlds.
Melanie Kreitler's article, “Looping Minds: Reclaiming Agency beyond a Normative Chronology,” looks at time loop films in which the protagonist has a mental illness. Kreitler asks how mental illness can alter the input-to-outcome relation of a time loop, arguing that the neurodivergent characters in these narratives can deviate from the neuronormative formula of popular time loop stories. She examines how some time loop films reinforce a neuronormative teleology, then considers the narrative qualities which allow others to break from this mold. Using John Maybury's Jacket (2005) and Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko (2001) as her case studies, Kreitler shows how the protagonists of these films achieve some degree of agency by embracing, rather than overcoming, non-normativity. She closes with a meditation on Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995), arguing that its characters’ narrative agency offers a way to question neurotypical mores.
Sean Yeager's contribution offers another perspective on neurodivergence and temporal looping. Their essay, “Kakokairos: A Not-Altogether-Unserious Theory of Time, Language, and Autism,” builds on Remi Yergeau's concept of kakokairos (loosely translated as “bad timing”) to articulate an autistic understanding of time and timeliness. Yeager first considers an everyday feedback loop: an autistic person has a delayed response to a social cue; this delay leads to awkwardness; this awkwardness leads to anxiety; and this anxiety leads to further delays. This positive feedback structure yields negative outcomes, resulting from—and reinforcing—a constant sense of autistic temporal displacement. In short, autistics must navigate neurotypical chrononormativity by synchronizing different perceptions of “good timing.” Yeager elucidates their understanding of kakokairos by close reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 and Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life (along with a brief look at Denis Villeneuve's screen adaptation of the latter, Arrival). They emphasize the hybrid temporality of each narrative's protagonist, using such hybridity as a model for understanding how autistics navigate clashing temporalities.
Our two closing essays, by Marco Caracciolo and Hilary Duffield, widen the view to a global scale. Though they take different approaches, both essays showcase how the question of balance in a self-regulating system relates to the cyclical structures that inform so many climate-fiction narratives. Marco Caracciolo's essay, “Narrative Loops and Climate Futures: A Form for Uncertain Times,” examines how the loop holds special significance for the imagination of the climate crisis. Caracciolo points out how feedback loops, such as the melting of ice caps, are central to the scientific understanding of climate change. Caracciolo's analyses of four cases from twenty-first-century literary fiction—Jessie Kellerman's Controller, Jeannette Winterson's Stone Gods, Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts, and Hanya Yanagihara's To Paradise—show how contemporary authors incorporate loops at different formal and stylistic levels in order to give narrative form to the uncertainty, nonlinearity, and moral stakes of climate change as a planetary event.
Hilary Duffield also turns to the function of time loops in narratives that envision human-caused environmental catastrophe. In her essay, “Anthropocene Consciousness, Time Loops, and Anticipatory Collective Trauma in Narratives of Anthropogenic Environmental Disaster,” Duffield outlines how the science fiction of time travel allows for timescales far beyond those of literary realism. The larger temporal scope, liberated from the confines of a human lifespan, opens the view for cyclical patterns and invites the looping movement of tracing long historical developments back to the present. With a focus on case studies from the second half of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first centuries, the essay shows how time loop narratives reflect the growing awareness of the disastrous impact that humans have had on life on the planet over time. Duffield claims that this “anthropocene consciousness” can permit or preclude the imagination of possible futures. Her case studies map a spectrum of how much agency is afforded to humans and to the environment in the face of ecological collapse; some function as a call to action, whereas others attempt to grapple with the inevitable.
The essays in this special issue explore the nature of narratological time loops from a number of angles. We begin with an ontological focus, then segue into a consideration of the effects that temporal looping can have on particular individuals and communities, and then eventually zoom out to a planetary scale. We regret that personal and family issues required Jonathan Kincaide to step back as our coeditor, and we thank him for his many contributions in developing this collaboration. We hope that readers will find these essays to be both informative and enjoyable.
Notes
Consider, for instance, the October 2004 special issue of Invisible Culture, edited by Margot Bouman. Those essays offer important considerations, but they are informed primarily by poststructuralist philosophy. Our present special issue considers the time loop as a fundamentally narratological structure, a perspective supported also by Ellen Stenstrom's writings on the subject (forthcoming).
For recent examples, see Dimock 2008; Brooks 2012; McGrath and Jebb 2015; Rifkin 2017; De Vos 2020. Despite our best efforts, we were unable to procure a contribution from an Indigenous author for this special issue. We acknowledge this as a shortcoming on our part, and we hope that calling attention to this lacuna will help open space for Indigenous scholarship on time loops.
See Kim and Anderson (1998) for helpful illustrations of combinatorically complex system archetypes.
Interestingly, Wiener ([1948] 2013: 35) hints at a connection between narration and nonlinear temporal structures in his foundational articulation of cybernetics, stating that “within any world with which we can communicate, the direction of time is uniform.” If his argument is correct, the communicative asymmetries of narration may be a necessary condition for rupturing temporal linearity.
Though the dynamics of such readerly looping are interesting, this issue is more attuned to writerly looping—i.e., loops which are built into the narrative itself, regardless of any individual's reading habits. This distinction, however, is not as clear-cut as might appear at first glance. The rogue-like genre is arguably emblematic of how games can uniquely deploy—and blur—these looping structures. Rogue-likes have a built-in looping mechanism that forces players to retry difficult challenges with only knowledge accruing between attempts, yet it is the player who chooses whether to embark on another playthrough. See Harris 2009 for an influential account of the genre's key features.
One of us has written extensively about the production and analysis of time maps (Yeager 2023). See Nelles and Williams 2018 and Kim et al. 2018 for more information.
This distinction is inspired by Wittenberg's (2012: 7) two strategies for parsing instances of time travel: “explicitly adopting some metanarrative frame” versus “selecting a privileged viewpoint.”
Strictly speaking, the lines do not need to be parallel—hence the “nearly” earlier. If time flows at a different rate within each iteration of the loop, then each line segment would have a different angle. Furthermore, we might even use curves instead of lines (e.g., y = tan(x) is arguably better for representing the warping of spacetime in an accordion-like universe which expands and contracts on itself ad infinitum, such as the one imagined on April 14, 1905, in Alan Lightman's novel Einstein's Dreams). A more accurate criterion for formal time looping is that a perfectly horizontal line moving upward must simultaneously cross multiple line segments, but this distinction rarely matters.
Muhlstock and Yeager (2024) recently described this effect in their time map of Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese's Netflix series Dark.
Charles Yu (2010: 115) pushes the boundaries of this rule in How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Instead of explicitly showing multiple iterations of a time loop, his metafictional avatar describes a single iteration and states, “If the loop is exactly the same set of events every time, she [TAMMY, his time machine's operating system] wouldn't have any way of distinguishing them. . . . Her memory doesn't work that way. . . . My memory doesn't work that way, either. I have no way of knowing how long I've been in this loop, and I'll never know.” Yu is, in effect, asking readers to imagine a potentially infinite number of parallel lines which are horizontally offset from each other by a distance of zero.
Wittenberg's (2012: 69) time map of All You Zombies features spiraling curves, rather than straight lines. These curves are more stylish but less accurate than a linear rendition of the narrative would be. Fortunately, the most important information—i.e., the varied presences of the character's iterations—seems to be well encoded, and this would ideally be preserved in a topological deformation from one map to another.
